2013 Ontario Budget

Wynne responds to NDP demands.  Wynne will introduce legislation this fall to create the position of a Financial Accountability Officer.  However, Wynne does not plan to give the ombudsman oversight of hospitals and she is going to go forward with her plan to allow wealthy people the option to abuse the car-pool lanes.  It will be interesting to see how the NDP feels about this.  Wynne apparently wants to meet with Andrea next week.

janfromthebruce wrote:

AW, you just used the same anology and argument that people have used for 2 tier healthcare - if we have a duel system, where the rich can pay for better services and medical attention, it will free up the "public system" and thus there will be less wait times. You just said let the rich pay for the special lane and it will reduce grid lock.

Highways aren't hospitals. You're equivocating.

Sigh, cleave to the status quo, and charge an egalitarian fee (which is tantamount to a flat tax) on all 400 highways, and the QEW, so that everyone can pay more to idle in traffic with their a/c cranked up, keeping in mind that motorists expensing their luxury vehicles, gas, repairs, insurance, parking, and tolls, will continue to do so, while everyone else continues to spend an extra hour on their commute, while public transit languishes for lack of additional subsidy, while transit authorities are left with no recourse but to raise fares, or reduce service, for those who can't afford a vehicle. How is that progressive?

It's fair to suggest that the transportation file has been mismanaged (take the sale of the 407, for example), but there are many other bad, and cynical decisions to examine (gas plant cancellations being the most recent boondoggle-- I would add nuclear power generation). But, since this thread is about the Ontario budget, I thought I might broach the idea of tax shifting. I realize that tolls are unpopular, and the prospect of seeing a Lexus breezing through a "hot" lane might cause indigestion, but it's an appropriate place to talk about cost, revenue, and expenditure in the public interest. How Ontario decides how to raise, and where it plans to spend it's residents' money, speaks volumes about its future direction. There's no time like the present to debate that. An election needs to be called this year, unless the Wynne and Horwath can agree on a coalition. Ontario needs a stable government going into equalization negotiations next year. Ontario must make the fiscal imbalance its priority, and that necessitates a concerted political front to hold firm on Ontario's demands. Future program expenditures depend on receiving net equalization increases, and a larger share of health transfers, to avoid the inevitable austerity pressures, should interest rates rise, and debt servicing increases as a share of the budget.

Aristotleded24 wrote:

autoworker wrote:

What does transportation infrastructure have to do with access to health services? There is no analogy here that I can see, unless taxpayers were to provide each resident with a vehicle, and then pay for its repairs when it breaks down. The idea is to make the existing infrastructure less congested by generating revenue towards affordable, and efficient public transit that's accessible to everyone.

You're missing the point. The idea of HOV lanes is to dedicate some space for people to travel more smoothly by carpooling or what have you. If people who travel by themselves can just pay an extra fee to drive in a lane set aside for carpooling, how does that help the people who have chosen to do the right thing?

Absolutely, discussion of tolls on roads and expansion of public transit is worthwhile, but this isn't about converting the roads to tolls, nor can I see where Wynne proposed to use the funding from the HOV tolls to put
into transit.

I agree that HOV lanes should be prioritized for their intended purpose. But if the lanes aren't being fully utilized during peak volumes, then it's a waste of not only infrastructure, but all the excess carbon and frustration that's generated with the commute. Personally, I'd rather see more car pooling, and expansion of GO service in the GTA, for instance. I don't know if Wynne has earmarked toll revenues for transit, but she should. Perhaps Horwath might become less populist, and more amenable to tolls, if that were to be the case. From my planet, I do believe that the LPO, and the ONDP need to formalize their relationship, at least until after the next federal election.

toaster wrote:

Aristotleded24 wrote:

autoworker wrote:

What does transportation infrastructure have to do with access to health services? There is no analogy here that I can see, unless taxpayers were to provide each resident with a vehicle, and then pay for its repairs when it breaks down. The idea is to make the existing infrastructure less congested by generating revenue towards affordable, and efficient public transit that's accessible to everyone.

You're missing the point. The idea of HOV lanes is to dedicate some space for people to travel more smoothly by carpooling or what have you. If people who travel by themselves can just pay an extra fee to drive in a lane set aside for carpooling, how does that help the people who have chosen to do the right thing?

Absolutely, discussion of tolls on roads and expansion of public transit is worthwhile, but this isn't about converting the roads to tolls, nor can I see where Wynne proposed to use the funding from the HOV tolls to put into transit.

Doing the right thing would be taking transit.  As was previously said, Rapid transit options are available where these HOV lanes are located.  The analogy to health care is ridiculous.  You've got a lot of nerve comparing people (voluntarily I might add, as rapid transit is available) sitting in a car an extra 30 minutes to people being denied health care access.  These voluntary taxes would not lead to privatization in anyway.

I wasn't the one who made the comparison to health care. As for the issue of HOV lanes, I would challenge that contention. Which rapid transit lines are we thinking of? Mississauga won't have its BRT up and running for a while, ditto for VIVA Rapidways in the York Region. And much of the transit infrastructure in the GTA is oriented towards moving people in and out of downtown Toronto, so if you have to travel from say Mississauga to Stoufville, doing so by transit is not very convenient. Taking transit may be the "rigth thing," but for all the costs in lost productivity and congestion, there are many instances where driving will get you there faster than taking transit, and people do value their time. Of course transit needs more funding and better routes to get people to and from where they want to do, but it's not clear that the fees Wynne proposed would go towards that.

I agree with Jan.  I don't see how anyone can argue that it's progressive to create Lexus lanes out of car-pooling lanes.  If you're not car-pooling, then stay out of the car-pooling lane.

autoworker wrote:

I think it would be progressive not to spend a good chunk of one's life stuck in traffic.

So you would rather people spend an even larger chunk of their lives on public transit systems which are slow and don't go where people want them to?

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Does anyone have the full list of all of Andreas demands that Wynn has met?

Public Auto insurence.
Jobs Training for young people.
An Ontario PBO.
More oversight over healthcare.
Wait times of 5 days for home care

And what else, I know there's more.

mark_alfred wrote:

The NDP is typically against user fees and flat taxes.  Sources of revenue should be progressive taxes.  Also, I don't think that owning or leasing a car equates with being wealthy.  83.8% of households have owned, leased or operated a vehicle in 2011 (CANSIM table  203-0027).  To state that this portion of the population has no financial worries is silly. 

I agree with Horwath on her position on the HOV lanes (they're supposed to be there for high occupancy vehicles, not for people who are driving single and pay for the privilege).  And I generally agree that flat taxes are not ideal. 

But using this statistic to bolster your argument is silly.  The person you are responding to was not talking about people who have "leased or operated" vehicles.  He was talking about people who either own vehicles or have long term leases.  Leasing a vehicle could mean a weekend rental.  That statistic would have included radiorahim and I in that 84% because we occasionally rented a car to go away on weekends, even though we didn't actually own or long-term lease a car for years (and I haven't owned one for most of my adult life - but I did occasionally rent cars, and I have had my driver's license since I was 16 and have often driven other people's cars).

Let's get serious here.  People who live in larger centres who can afford to own a car (and that certainly isn't 83% of households or anywhere close to it) can also afford to pay for auto insurance.  If they can't, there's the occasional weekend car rental or public transit.  (And public transit, by the way, should have NO user fees in order to encourage those people who DO own cars to use their cars less, and to give those who can't afford cars or who choose not to own one for whatever reason a financial break - maybe the NDP should consider adopting that policy, although I'm sure it's too radically left-wing for them.)  I know, I'm living in Toronto now where there is decent public transit (getting worse all the time due to lack of proper planning or funding), but I lived in Kingston without a car for many years, and their public transit system is not the greatest, to say the least, because I couldn't afford a car.  Most Ontarians do live in larger urban centres with some kind of public transit available.  And those who don't live in large urban centres get cheaper insurance than those of us who do anyhow.

We just got a car a couple of weeks ago, after years of not having one.  A friend was unloading his car for a price we couldn't resist, and we worked out that the price we were paying to rent cars from Autoshare for weekend trips and errands in the city was about equal to owning one, even factoring in the insurance, repairs, and gas.  So we bought it.  Did the insurance hurt?  Yep, it surely did, especially since I don't have much insurance experience, but I'm not complaining.  We took that cost into account when deciding whether owning a car was worth it, and for many years it wasn't, so I didn't own one.  It makes me extra-specially careful on the road (don't need tickets or accidents making my insurance rate go up).  It stopped me from buying a car for many years up until now. It makes me think twice about whether I need to drive it to do this or that, as opposed to walking, taking transit or taking my e-bike (which I still use regularly for errands or when I go downtown), because I estimated a low mileage per year when applying for insurance.  Now, I would be much happier with PUBLIC auto insurance - I'd love to think that any profit coming from my insurance premiums will be going toward the public good.  But again, probably a little too radical for today's ONDP, and besides, who'd believe them anyhow?

One thing I'm discovering, as a new car owner, is that it's actually cheaper to drive to work than to take public transit once you already own a car.  Isn't that nuts?  I mean, if you were buying a car JUST to drive to work, then yes, public transit is cheaper than owning a car.  But we found that in addition to taking public transit in Toronto to commute (although we mostly do that by e-bike - cheaper AND faster than transit, even factoring in the cost of the bike), we found we also rented Autoshare cars to do stuff we couldn't do on public transit or e-bike easily, like go away for weekends to places that VIA doesn't go, or to transport bulky stuff.  And once you own a car, the marginal cost of driving to work every day, if you live near where you work, is way, way less than taking transit.  I discovered that the cost of gas to get me to and from work every day works out to about $15 per week, even at the high gas prices now.  TTC would cost me at least $30, and that's assuming that I don't make any stops along the way to or from work.  With a car, you can stop and run errands on the way home - can't do that on the TTC without paying an additional fare. 

Not to mention that when you take the car, you always get a seat, and you get there in a fraction of the time it takes on the TTC if you're going somewhere outside of the downtown core (and I work in an industrial park way up in North York near the 401).  The only thing that would induce me to take transit to work now is if it cost less than taking my e-bike or car, since it takes over an hour for me to get to work by transit, with two bus changes per trip, and it's often a miserable experience due to overcrowding.  But it doesn't cost less than either of them.  It's pretty dumb, really.  Want to get people out of their cars, and make life less miserable for people who can't afford cars or choose not to own one?  Free and properly-funded public transit would go a long way towards that.  Transit City would have been well underway now had it not been for the Ford clown show (and the province's dithering).  I'd happily pay more property tax (and everyone pays property taxes whether they're doing it indirectly through their rent or directly if they own a house) in order to make this a reality.  And I would probably take public transit to work more often if it was free, despite the inconvenience and overcrowding, because I actually like the exercise of walking to and from bus stops, etc.

I'm going to be mighty pissed off when I start seeing a bunch of single-occupant vehicles in HOV lanes.  That's just wrong and completely defeats the purpose of HAVING HOV lanes.  Horwath is absolutely right on that one.  Is it worth triggering an election over?  No, probably not.  I think she's doing the right thing at this point - she's gotten pretty much all she can get, and this budget is way better than the risk of a Hudak government.  I agree with Jan above - the right-to-work shit and other regressive policies that are coming if Hudak gets in is way scarier than anything in this budget, at least for me.  And if anyone thinks the ONDP is going to win an election called now, they're living in a dreamworld.  It's not worth the gamble at this point.  Too much to lose if the Cons win.

The NDP asked for a limited amount of minor policies and those were mostly met.  They can't start adding items to the list just because they didn't ask for enough to begin with. In labour relations that is called bargaining in bad faith and they would suffer in the polls for trying it.

Yup including public auto insurance in the list of things they asked for was funny but unfortunately it is hard to tell whether the poster was serious or not.

Hi Michelle.  You're likely right that the statistic may have covered a broader segment of the population than was appropriate.  Still, the flat out assessment that vehicle ownership = wealth, and therefore it equals good policy to convert car-sharing lanes to so-called HOT lanes seemed wrong on a variety of levels (all previously discussed).

I myself was a user of Autoshare back in the pre-Zip Car/Car2Go era.  It was okay, but I found that simply using my bike or transit or a cab once in a while was better.

I recall feeling disappointed when the Rae NDP did not implement public auto insurance.  The Rae NDP did some good things, but that oversight was a disappointment.  Still, often big initiatives like that are second term projects. 

From what I've read (and do correct me if I'm wrong) auto insurance rates in Ontario are disproportionately higher than are rates elsewhere in Canada (regardless of lower collision rates).  Regulations to ensure fairness of big business entities like banks and insurance companies seems a good thing to advocate for.  The argument "but car drivers are evil, so let them be swindled" doesn't wash with me. 

Anyway, despite nuances I feel we're in agreement on many things.  The NDP did well with the negotiations with the Liberals.  Hopefully next election the NDP will win.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

mark_alfred wrote:

I recall feeling disappointed when the Rae NDP did not implement public auto insurance.  The Rae NDP did some good things, but that oversight was a disappointment.  Still, often big initiatives like that are second term projects. 

I don't think that is the case. Both BC and Sask got auto insurance in the first term of their CCF/NDP governments.

As did Manitoba.

Yep. You get into power, and you deliver on what you promise. Why's that hard to understand? It's telling that Rae didn't keep his promise, and Ontario is the province with a one-term NDP government.

And sadly there is no party whose platform says we will get out of those deals if they form government.  They are here forever. That is the political consensus.

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